At 8.00pm on 6th March Sorren Maclean is playing his home town of Tobermory – at An Tobar – with his usual backup line of John Barlow on drums and Gordon Maclean on bass. He’s supported by Glasgow-based songwriter, Anna Meldrum.
Tickets are £8 and £6 for members and -18s. Phone An Tobar on: 01688 302211
At 8.00pm on 6th March at An Tobar, Tobermory’s Sorren Maclean is back in his home venue after his February tour and is celebrating the release of his new single, ‘Bus Tax and Bars’. He’ll have his usual backing band of John Barlow (drums) and Gordon Maclean (bass), generating upbeat pop and catchy tunes. And in this gig, Sorren is supported by Glasgow based songwriter Anna Meldrum. (Tickets are £8, with £6 for members and -18s.) Continue reading
Yesterday afternoon, Max Hunter, a 39 year-old climbing guide leading three clients at the time, fell 700ft with a collapsing cornice in the Stob Coire nan Lochan area.
Mr Hunter, who works for a climbing company, moved to Fort William from Swansea for the climbing opportunities offered by Scotland’s mountains.
Glencoe Mountain Rescue Team and an RAF helicopter were on the scene and got the guide airlifted to Belford Hospital in Fort William – where he has had time to come to terms with his good luck.
At 8.00pm on Tuesday 3rd March at An Tobar In Tobermory Ewan Robertson, guitarist and singer from Carrbridge in Strathspey is doing a gig. Ewan was the first guitarist to win the BBC Young Traditional Musician of the Year in 2008. He’s been playing traditional music for as long as he can remember, going to ceilidhs in the village hall and listening to Capercaillie tapes in the back of his mum’s Volkswagen Beetle! (Enviable lifestyle.) As well as solo gigs, he also plays with up and coming outfit Breabach.
Phone At Tobar for details: 01688 302211. Tickets are £10 or £8 for members and -18s.
They say – well they will now – that the way to a woman’s heart is a barrel of Bruichladdich.
It was this morning anyway - in Warehouse 2 at the distillery in Islay – for Kristian Dahl and Anne Abom from Denmark. The two Danes had joined the 10.00 am distillery tour which ends up in Warehouse 2.
Here, Kristian went down on one knee, in front of Anne – and a cask of new spirit – and proposed to her. The cask had been purchased surreptitiously the day before to act as the engagement ring. She said yes.
From next month onwards, people can get married in the Bruichladdich Distillery‘s still house – the only such place in the UK. And you wouldn’t have to go to far for the reception of the century.
For Argyll has just published a series of articles to do with the powerful This Is Who We Are photographic exhibition, exploring life in places in Canada and Scotland linked by similar names.
The creators of the exhibition, Graeme Murdoch and Harry McGrath have now issued an invitation to all Argyll communities whose names are echoed in places in Canada – we have already mentioned a Rothesay, a Campbelltown (yes, two ls), a Lismore,, an Iona, a Calgary … and there are many others.
The invitation is to take your own photographs in and of your place – photographs which tell abut the life you lead. What happens in your place? Where does its heart beat? What are its special places? What are its important occasions? Who’s around?
Graeme and Harry want your own individual views – literally – of where you live and what it’s like to be there.
This project has the capacity to build living and productive links between Argyll places and, initially, places in Canada with whom they share a name. The project is intended to move on to other parts of the world where there are Scottish connections of all kinds. These guys will literally trail the presence of Scotland across the globe. The mutual advantages in this are endless and as much profound as practical.
Practically, the project will provide names of people to talk to and places to go and see for people travelling in both directions. Above all things, this stops anyone feeling a stranger in the other’s place..
More profoundly, it will develop a modern belonging – in both directions. We tend to think of people elsewhere belonging here – but they inhabit another Scotland – many other Scotlands – we can discover and belong to.
All it takes is to open communications – share information and images. So get clicking now while the idea’s hot and email your photographs to Graeme at: graeme@culturalconnectscotland.com
The photograph above is of Grame (centre front, kilt) and Harry (dark sweatshirt, behind Graeme) at a Lil’wat First Nation powwow at Mount Currie on their recent travels on this project. Our feature article on This Is Who We Are looks at the curious fact that the surname Wallace is one of the major Lil’wat names.
Argyll’s representative at Westminster, Alan Reid MP, has spoken widely across Argyll about the need to save the Post Office from the part-privatisation the UK Government proposes – and about saving local Post Offices.
This is admirable and appropriate action. The issue involves powers reserved to Westminster and is precisely where Mr Reid’s energies need to be focusis critical for Argyll, with its small population dispersed across an extensive rural and island area and its low economic base.
The puzzle is though, that Mr Reid has not yet signed the Early Day Motion 426. This was lodged by Labour MP Geraldine Smith, as a protest at the Westminster Government’s plans to begin the process of privatising the Post Office. The motion has been signed by virtually all of the many Labour MPs who oppose this move and others - and it has been available for signing for some time.
This failure to formally register his opposition may well simply be an oversight on Mr Reid’s behalf but it is one that requires to be remedied at once.
This is a cross party issue of real importance to rural areas like Argyll and Bute and it transcends petty politics. No one should be under any illusions that privatisation will inevitably lead to a reduced and more expensive service in rural areas where there is no real opportunity for private profits.
Dave Thompson, Highlands MSP, angered by the latest revelation of Lord Mandelson’s plan to bypass the House of Commons and introduce legislation to privatise Royal Mail, has written to the Communication Workers Union (CWU) in support of their opposition campaign to offer his assistance in any way he can. The CWU is Britain’s largest communications union and Mr thompson sees it as leading one of the most dynamic campaigns against privatisation.
Mr Thompson says: ‘I am appalled by Lord Mandelson’s decision to go forward with this proposal, and it has now shockingly come to light that these plans go even farther than previously understood by allowing up to 49.9% of Royal Mail to be privatised’.
Below is a list of all of the Scottish MPs who have not uyet signed the Early Day Motion (whose text is at the foot of this list). What have these MPs been saying to their own constituents? Have they too been saying one thing at home to get votes and doing nothing at Westminster because they actually believe that the Post Office should indeed be sold off?
The overall list of Scottish MPs who have NOT signed the Early day Motion to protect the Post Office are:
For information – here is the text of Geraldine Smith’s Early day Motion opposing the part-privatisation of the Post Office
Text of EDM 428:
That this House
Appin of Yesteryear, Joint Winner of the Best Heritage Website Award in the ForArgyll Awards 2008 has some new features and material.
Stuart Carmichael has added a Forum for the website, its up and running and, although it’s early days there are already some contributions to it.
Up to now, Stuart has answered a number of queries direct by email, he’s hoping to receive and respond to queries through the Forum – a process which allows others to contribute information, helping to build a bigger picture.
He has also done some research into the history of Appin School and added this to the Archive section. Stuart describes this work as ‘quite satisfying and enjoyable to do, especially as far as I am aware, this has not been done before. The fact that the Mistress of the Junior department resigned in the late 1800’s as she was having a relationship with the Headmaster, all adds to interesting research!’
Please now form an orderly queue in the rush to the Appin of Yesteryear site.
The photograph on the left is one on which Stuart is currently working. It’s of the 1920 Appin School cohort. If you recognise anyone, contact Stuart through the Appin of Yesteryear website. He’ll be glad either to have confirmation or new information.
For Argyll has published a feature article – This Is Who We Are – on the exhibition of that name, the most inspirational of the main Homecoming Scotland 2009 commissions. Its creators are Graeme Murdoch, a photographer and former art director for a series of national newspapers and Harry McGrath, an academic and Coordinator of the Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver (pictured left, with Harry on the left and Graeme on the right).
The exhibition brings together images from a selection of Scottish diaspora communities in Canada – in Nova Scotia, Alberta and British Columbia.
The journey described in the feature – from Vancouver to Calgary, Airdrie, Canmore, Banff, Craigellachie, Coldstream, Mont Currie and back to Vancouver – was one of several the two men made in putting this exhibition together.
What follows here is a series of photographs taken on these journeys by Graeme Murdoch and captioned by him. Together they catch something of the flavour of the rich variety of experiences the two men encountered as they tracked the seeds planted by the Scots in Canada.
THE ROAD EAST: after a long flight from Edinburgh we headed east from Vancouver. Now we are in Western Canada driving hundreds of miles on the Trans Canada Highway through rainforests, snow capped mountains, and arid plains to places where Scots have been before and left a trail of toponyms – Calgary, Banff, Airdrie, Coldstream, Craigallachie, Abbotsford – for us to follow. Ahead of us is Mount MacDonald, named after John MacDonald, Canada’s first premier. Beyond, the Rockies, and our destination, Calgary. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)
CALGARY, ALBERTA: the petro-capital of western Canada. The original settlement became a post of the North-West Mounted Police (now the RCMP). Originally named Fort Brisebois, after NWMP officer Éphrem A Brisebois, it was renamed Fort Calgary in 1876 by Colonel James Macleod after his home on Mull. The day after we hit town we appeared on CTV live noon news. ‘I had no idea that Calgary was named after a place in Scotland’, said Ian White, CTV anchor man. Our story was launched. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)
AIRDRIE: the open plains of Airdrie in Alberta. (Photo: Kori Sych)
BEAR CUB: we were eager to see bears, and did in British Columbia, but our friend Pam Doyle, the writer/photographer on the Canmore Leader sent us this picture of a bear cub making a dash for the woods. (Photo by Pam Doyle)
IONA: East Bay, near Iona. This was the first major Scottish Settlement on Cape Breton Island (Photo by Derek Campbell)
CAPE BRETON CHURCH: snowy kirkyard in Inverness County, Cape Breton. (Photo: Derek Campbell)
SIGNS: Scotland is everywhere in Canada. This is the north shore road in Pictou County, Nova Scotia. One name not on the sign is Knoydart which is a small hamlet near Lismore. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)
LISMORE, NOVA SCOTIA: The sun lit church cemetery of ST Mary’s RC church. Two lines from a poem on a panel by the church state:
“A narrow creed drove Scotmen o’er the sea,
Their hearts were Mary’s and they would be free.”
by Rev. A. A. MacKinnon
Lismore was once called Bailey’s Brook after John Baillie, a disbanded soldier from the 82nd Regiment, who settled at the mouth of the brook. It is a settlement of Highland Catholics beginning in 1788. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)
PICTOU: It is 5.30am and I wake to the first clear sky since we arrived in Nova Scotia. This is the graveyard on the point outside town where many of the descendants of the settlers who arrived on the Hector in 1773 are buried. The names on the headstones are testimony to Pictou’s motto: “The Birthplace of New Scotland”. There are Grants, Frasers, MacDonalds, Mackintoshes laid to rest here. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)
Copy right on all the photographs above resides with the named photogrtaphers and are reproduced here with permission.
We’re about to describe a journey so start seeing it in your head. The first step is a drive east to Calgary, then north to Airdrie, back south to Calgary, then north west to Banff and south west through Craigellachie to Coldstream.
Much of this is familiar but something’s not quite right. If you drove east to Calgary you’d be starting in the Atlantic. If you went north from Calgary looking for Airdrie you’d be hard put to find it – and if you struck north west from Calgary to Banff you’d land on Barra first.
We’re not in Scotland, of course. We’re in Canada, travelling with two inventive and creative Scots. One is photographer and former national newspaper art director, Graeme Murdoch, who has worked with some of the world’s leading photographers and ‘done time at The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday’. His colleague is academic, Harry McGrath, who has lived in Canada for 25 years and has been Coordinator of the Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University – a name known to every piper in the world and whose pipe band is the current Grade 1 World Champions.
Graeme and Harry are here in pursuit of the most exciting and productive of the inspirations to be stimulated by the Homecoming Scotland 2009 initiative. They’re exploring the other Scotland, out west – and finding out who we are, whichever of the Scotlands we live in just now.
The route travelled on the journey above, one of many on this odyssey, says everything about what the two men are doing. They are taking a set of what we receive as familiar places, then throwing them into an entirely different relationship to each other and to us – and the result is disturbing and oddly exciting. They then reveal ‘the other’, something we know and do not know at the same time.
All of this starts to put a picture together, to show us who we are. As Graeme says, you don’t have to be a native Scot to be of Scotland. An article in Hidden Europe said of Argyll, ‘Argyll is a state of mind’. This is as equally true of Scotland as it is of any place that matters to anyone.
The top photograph is of the Bay at the original Calgary in the north west of Argyll’s Isle of Mull. (Photo:Scottish Viewpoint) The lower photograph is of Calgary, Alberta - the petro-capital of western Canada. The original settlement became a post of the North-West Mounted Police (now the RCMP). Originally named Fort Brisebois, after NWMP officer Éphrem A Brisebois, it was renamed Fort Calgary in 1876 by Colonel James Macleod after his home on Mull. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)
One place and another
Look at what happens if you superimpose the two maps.
Vancouver looks east to Canada’s Calgary and further east to the first Calgary on the north west of Argyll’s Isle of Mull – looking chronologically from the newer development to its source. It’s a reverse experience of standing at the Place de la Concorde in Paris, looking up the Champs Elysees through the Arc de Triomph and out to La Defense where the modern Grande Arche – the imperative of the future, dominates the horizon.
And talking of reversals, this is a world where Knoydart is a hamlet near Lismore.
Scotland’s first Airdrie can put itself in the position of its newer namesake (the photograph above shows the open plains of Airdrie in Alberta. Photo: Kori Sych ) and feel the pull of the mighty Calgary to its south.
All of this drives you to interrogate your orientation and to explore the impact of different relationships. There’s nothing so liberating as ‘What if…’.
Harry and Graeme put their journey plans together and then took off. Graeme describes them both as ‘media tarts’ so when they hit each place on their route, they make for the TV and radio stations and the local papers. It doesn’t take long for the old arterial connections they are after to start running free again.
On one occasion they were on CTV’s noon news bulletin in Calgary after what Graeme describes as: ‘… a 14 hour flight from Edinburgh via Amsterdam to Vancouver, then a 480 mile drive across the Rockies and looking like we’d been up all night, which was not far from the truth’. During the five minute interview, Ian White the anchorman, admitted he hadn’t known that Canada’s great oil and gas metropolis was named after a tiny settlement on the west coast of Mull. He does now – and so do his viewers.
This Is Who We Are
Graeme Murdoch says of the photo below: Now we are in Western Canada driving hundreds of miles on the Trans Canada Highway through rainforests, snow capped mountains, and arid plains to places where Scots have been before and left a trail of toponyms – Calgary, Banff, Airdrie, Coldstream, Craigallachie, Abbotsford – for us to follow. Ahead of us is Mount MacDonald, named after John MacDonald, Canada’s first premier. Beyond, the Rockies, and our destination, Calgary. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)
In each community in their tours of Canada – in Nova Scotia, Alberta and British Columbia – the two initiate a photography project among the local people. What they produce will eventually link back to the places in Scotland with the same names and is gradually creating a digital archive of images of the Scottish diaspora.
Graeme and Harry are shaping an exhibition from all of this. It will never be finished because there are so many Scotlands across the world to be connected with each other. But it already has a strong identity. This Is Who We Are is the title of their initial exhibition. It was launched by then Environment now Culture Minister, Michael Russell, at Dumfries on Burns Night and will complete its current cycle in an exhibition at the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood on St Andrews Day.
There can be no stronger statement about the perceived value of this work than that it has opened and will close Homecoming Scotland 2009. It is and will be the gatekeeper, the junction, the exchange of experiences, the melting pot, the new Scottish alchemy. It makes it possible for Scots everywhere to see backwards and forwards in a single gaze.
What it has already done is extraordinary. These two men have flown, driven and walked the line between Scotlands. They have been a physical and present link between them. You could legitimately use the word ‘ambassadorial’ but that word summons something more self important than life enhancing. This work articulates the incoherent heart of Homecoming Scotland, giving it meaning, dignity – freeing it to soar.
Discoveries
The men have entered the maelstrom of the diaspora and emerged clutching treasures from the deep past.
One of these was the discovery that many of the Lil’wat First Nation community in Mount Currie, near Whistler – host to the 2010 Winter Olympics – carry the surname Wallace. One of the Lil’wat Wallaces, now a friend, Stan Wallace, told how he thought they had come to have the name.
He believes that Government Indian agents went through the valley to register native people and ‘either couldn’t spell our Indian names or didn’t want to and so assigned us random names’. It seems likely that one of these agents was a Scot who used the iconic Wallace name as one of the ‘random’ names to be chosen.
Harry points out: ‘Renaming First Nation people was common practice and part of a form of cultural denigration that included banning of cultural practices like potlach and longhouses and eventually the taking away of children and placing them in residential schools far from their community. The latter happened to Stan who was taken as a child by the Oblate Fathers and put in residential school three hundred miles away near Prince George’.
Stan’s wife, Shawn Wallace who is the main continuing contact for Harry and Graeme, has her own more direct Scottish connection. Her Great Great Grandfather came from Orkney and was called Bruce – so in her life she has been both Bruce and Wallace.
Harry also says that the youth soccer team from Mount Currie has been to Scotland to play, brought here by Jim Easton who was a professional with Hibs in the 1960s and now lives in Vancouver. The most recent connection with Mount Currie is the This Is Who We Are project.
The photograph above shows Frank Wallace, a Lil’wat traditional dancer (Photo by ShawnWallace, wife of Stan Wallce whose theory about the origins of the Wallace name in the Lil’wat First Nation is above.)
Art for life’s sake
This article reflects only a fragment of the interconnections Graeme (on the right in this photograph) and Harry (on the left) have unearthed and reinvigorated and it makes you impatient and hungry for more.
The exhibition in not the sort of art that any Duke of Sutherland will ever sell to the nation for £50million for passive viewing.
This is an art that we are a part of making, that encompasses us, that shows us to ourselves in new ways, that opens doors to possibilities of all kinds. It is a fluid and living art, responsive to its circumstances, never complete. It deals in the territory between the moment and the infinite. It is not a fixed and unchanging art that draws its audiences to its own certainties.
As he opened the exhibition at its launch, Culture Minister Michael Russell said: ‘This exhibition brings us closer to the real idea of homecoming: it presents the link that is made by people who are like us but who have faced different challenges. It is an exhibition that is not only visually exciting but also one that stirs emotions and thoughts’.
Jim Mather, Enterprise, Energy and Tourism Minister and Argyll’s MSP, said of the project: ‘This is a truly magical project that uses the power of photography to connect and lift the spirits of people in Scotland and Canada. For many of us on this side of the Atlantic we now have the evidence that not just hearts are Highland and Scottish but so too is the warmth of many modern photographed Canadians. Equally, these photographs confirm the great affinity between our peoples whether there are genetic links or not. The photos also show we share values and attitudes and my wish is that long may they continue to bind us together’.
It would be a privilege for Argyll to have the opportunity to be a part of this most galvanic of the Homecoming Scotland events and to engage in this conversation between Scotlands. It has to be possible and it has to be made possible.
The photograph above shows Harry McGrath on the left and Graeme Murdoch on the right.
Footnotes:
See and read the companion story to this feature under Homecoming Argyll in the top menu of this site – This Is Who We Are: photographs from the journeys to find out - a piece of photo-journalism by Graeme Murdoch on the his and Harry McGrath’s journeys and experiences across Canada, treading in the footsteps of those whose forefathers footsteps had once imprinted on the hills and glens of Scotland.
See and read too the articles below, from the media in the UK, Canada and Scotland, describing and reflecting on This Is Who We Are. There is little duplication. Each of these adds to what you see and discover about this adventure in Scottish conversations.
Copyright on all photographs above resides with the named photographer and are reprodced here with permission.
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